Re: GREP

[Jeff Howie <Jeff.Howie@federated.ca>]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 12:41:15PM -0700, Erik Steffl wrote:
> Damian Menscher wrote:
> > On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Erik Steffl wrote:
> > >   the main difference is a sideeffect, sort of, if grep is called for
> > > with one file as an argument it only prints the line matched, not the
> > > filename, so you get bunch of lines (each successfull match) but you
> > > have no idea which files these lines are in...
> > >
> > >   and probably some other more or less dirty tricks...
> > 
> > Look in the grep manpage for the -l option  ;)
> 
>   but then you get only the filename, not the line(s) matched, I have
> found out that I usually prefer (find most usable) the way grep works
> when it has more then one file (filename:line), so I use that as a
> default (of course, if only one file is found by find you still don't
> see filename in grep's output even when using xargs:-)

This is because that grep will only print the file name for multiple
files. You can fool grep by including /dev/null, as in:

    $ find / -type f | xargs grep blah /dev/null

So if only one file is found by find, grep will still think it's
searching multiple files & preface the file name(s).

thks.jeff